Musings From New York

The funda behind the song is gruesomely interesting.

Does anyone remember the German sensational affair last year of some whacked out dude posting a message on the Net (or something similar) for a 18-35 year old he could kill and eat? And that some other whack job actually showed up? The story can be read up on at the BBC ... well this song is about that.

I was tripping on the song enough to look for translation of the lyrics. And trust me, it's gruesome! The verse talks about what it'd feel like to kill & eat a person and the pre-chorus bridge goes:

Denn du bist/ was du isst/ und ihr wisst/ was es ist ... which translates into ...

Because you are/ what you eat/ and you know/ what it is

The song itself is soul-crushing industrial metal. Repeated hearings have given me headaches! Cool!

haven't watched Resident Evil: Apocalypse yet, but I am totally tripping out on 2 songs from it's soundtrack. One's Rammstein's "Mein Teil" (German for "My Thing").

The other song is one that I recommend to everyone on this group. It's very radio-friendly and very catchy. It's also very morbid ... a pleasant combination, I might add. It's rare that one hears a radio-friendly pop-oriented number on teen suicide. Some of you know the song (Don't Fear) The Reaper by Blue Oyster Cult, which is about teen suicide as well. Well ....this song isn't as subtle about it's subject. :-D

The song is called "Join Me In Death" by a Finnish group called H.I.M. (His Infernal Majesty).

And what do I mean by pop-oriented? Think boy-band (Boyzone, Backstreet Boys, etc.) ... but H.I.M. is boy-band plus guitars on overdrive! The song actually is built on a piano-driven melody. It's Goth Metal at its most accessible.

Check it out folks. All you've got to ask yourself is one question: Are you ready to die for love tonight?

You can see what alterations have been made in the new version of the Star Wars trilogy here.

There's a bunch of lists on TheForce.net ... my favourite was Why Star Wars Is Better Than The Matrix. The really funnier lines were:

Star Wars has Anthony Daniels play a robot - The Matrix has Neo played by a robot.

Can the Nebuchadnezzar make the Kessel Run in 12 Parsecs?

Star Wars didn't fall apart after two movies. It took four.

(Insert Johns Williams fanfare here)

I hate Amazon. They only just shipped my copies of the DVDs. I hope I get them by the weekend (All 3 Star Wars movies back to back to back ... 18 hours of glorious Jedi action!). I'm surprised that Bill Amend's Foxtrot comic strip hasn't commented on them already.

So half the Star Wars fandom is up in arms about the new tweaks in Lucas' movies. I'd say it's a good thing - I mean, it's his vision. If he made the changes on an artistic level, then kudos to him. If he made the changes for purely commercial reasons (which he hasn't) then the detracting fans have I case.

I remember the Star Wars vs. Star Trek fan fiction/parodies I used to read on Yahoo Humour Pages in the good old days of dial up ... for a fan of both series, those parodies really were a good laugh. They don't seem to be up anymore :-( But there are some good humour sites out there in any case ...

It's George "Dubya" "War President" Bush! He's adressing the UN tonight ... or is it tomorrow? I'll have to tune into the Daily Show to find out :-)

Needless to say, my block has been barricaded again.

A colleague of mine at work (Steve) and I used to have heated debates about who was better at predicting weather - the Brits, or the Americans.

My take was that the Brits didn't have any weather to predict ("Uh, it's going to be foggy in the early morning, raining by mid-morning, maybe a tornado in the afternoon, followed by intermittent sunshine, and we end the day with more rain. Tomorrow may be sunny, or it may rain.").

I saw this prediciton of Tropical Storm Jeane (from a link on Dave Barry's blog) and figured he's probably won the argument!

A whole new dimension to the above phrase was brought to my attention today when I heard last week's edition of "Wait, Wait! Don't Tell Me!". Basically, the (British) Royal Navy will install Windows O/S on its subs - including those carrying thermo-nuclear warheads.

"Are you sure you want to launch this missile?" Yes-No

"This Sub has perform an illegal military operation and will now sink. If this war persists, please contact the MOD." (find this quote and the full article here)

Yeah, my UIUC alum has a new website. A lot of his older reviews can be found theree too. Be sure to check out the Little Movie Glossary section. it's a reader-defined/spoofy list of movie effects/scenarios/plot devices, etc. For example:

Harrison Ford Situational Reassessment Doubletake: Scene where Harrison Ford chases a small number of bad guys. He then stops suddenly, his expression changes to one of shock, and he runs back the way he came, as we see that the bad guys have been joined by a large number of reinforcements. (See "Star Wars," "Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom." JEFF CROSS, Marblehead, Mass.

Just Here for the Ambience: Characters order full meals, talk for a few minutes and then leave without eating any of the food or paying the bill.

Java clarified that Bush was staying (allegedly, at least) at the Waldorf ... which is a couple of blocks near my place. Which explains the cops & the barriers over the last few days. For some reason they're still up, even though the convention ended yesterday.

I believe some of the delegates are staying over the weekend, so I guess thing's return to normal (or as close as they can get in NYC) next week.

Around 11am today, I went down to the street ... it was chaos. I don't know where all the protestors from this morning went, but it was still weird. Cops everywhere. Secret Service agents ... well, I think they were Secret Service. They looked like they'd walked off the set of Men In Black, and had that piece of loopy telephone cord behind their ear.

The police had put up concrete & steel barricade along most cross streets, and weren't allowing traffic onto Lexington Avenue. Obviously, it was someone major ... and I wonder who it was.

Cheney's already in town - he addressed the RNC right? This guy from the White House came on The Daily Show last night and said that Bush was in town and would be practicing his spech in his hotel room this morning ... so who else is left who'd deserve an entire avenue being shut down? Powell? Ridge? Rummy?

Here's another photo of the motorcade

So Java & I are chillin, and we hear a lot of noise outside. We see this massive number of motorcycle cops rolling down the street. We rushed downstairs and saw a motorcade pass by. We managed to take some pictures - I'm surprised the cops didn't tackle us :-)

We asked a cop when he was clearing away the barriers and he said it was .... (dum dum daaa!) George "Dubya" "Yee-haa" "War President" Bush! I wonder where he's staying ...